The Great Escape

Hollywood’s gloss on reality makes Olivia Glazebrook want to weep. Why can’t the Americans learn from the French?

When Hollywood wants to captivate an audience of ‘grown-ups’ — those who have become desperate to escape the awful dreariness and suffering of their everyday lives — it shows them an alternative soothing world into which they can be plugged, for just a few hours.

These poor suckers — we’ll call them ‘cinema-goers’ — yearn for this glossy, idealised world, which will be not a dream (because dreams can be puzzling and obtuse) but a calming vision, populated by beautiful characters who will look human, but not too human. These characters will tend to inhabit large, bare apartments to signify their isolation, or large, cluttered houses to signify their domesticity. A flashback to a golden past (featuring a woman and/or children) will alert us to their regret. Speech will be instructive: men will explain to puzzled women where they are, in a physical or emotional sense, and where they are going next — just like giving directions. Surprises — buildings exploding or cars crashing — will happen in slow motion and be accompanied by music. There may be wrongs — jeopardy, wounding or even death — but they will always be righted so that the cinema-goers need suffer no anxiety or unease beyond the walls of the multiplex. Such resonance would be most unwelcome.

This type of film is not fantasy but nor is it realism. It showcases a world that seems like ours, and is advertised as ours, but has been improved. Thanks to computer-generated imagery, not only its surfaces but also its inhabitants have been ironed of their creases, and their behaviour is correspondingly smooth: their speech is a glib shorthand and they respond to events with skilful, learned motions.